If those 8 companies were splitting the sales of ram, it only takes one company to come in and sell it at a proper price and take 100% of the business...and it only takes one member of the cartel refusing to license their DRAM patents to the upstart to make that business 100% illegal. The free market is almost always powerless to correct abuses of a monopoly or a cartel.
Well if it ain't mister Johnny-come-lately himself! In MY day, we wrote "code" in pencil, did computation on an abacus, and sent our cliche posts to slashdot by telegram....mumble mumble... MD5 sums by hand...mumble... seige of Vicksburg...mumble... TCP/IP over smoke signals... durn whipper-snappers
I wonder if he realizes that with the right connections and a few thousand bucks, *everything* about his life is shared on the internet. Financial transactions, phone bills, property ownership, FedEx and UPS shipping records, legal records, etc are all there in corporate databases and on information brokering sites. A judicious use of the phrase "patriot act" could probably get you all the bank statements and phone records you could ever want.
He can be smug now, but his next job interview could still go something like this... "So, Mr. Rogers, I see here that in September of 1988 you wrote a $200 cheque to a women's health clinic that no member of your family had ever visited before. That's about the same time your teenage daughter broke off her relationship with the Tanner boy who used to live down the street from you, or at least she stopped calling him every night, isn't it? The CEO is strongly pro-life and things like this concern him greatly. Anything you want to tell us about that incident?"
You probably have CTrax because the RIAA has threatened to sue colleges over student file sharing. $150,000 statutory damages per willful infringment (read: copy), times 10,000 students, times 1000 copied songs per student = a $1.5 trillion lawsuit. Much cheaper to license CTracks for a couple million per year and call it RIAA insurance that to risk losing a suit that would bankrupt the school (and the whole state government if it's public).
Why would they care? They just got half a B...
on
The Man Behind MySpace
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Would you bother fixing bugs if someone just gave you $586 million for a bug-riddled pile of crap? I sure wouldn't. I suspect the QA process at myspace goes something like this...
Minimum Wage Support Monkey: "Umm, sir, we're getting lots of bug reports from users. They say chat doesn't work, and some of their pages have been down since Thursday."
Myspace Co-Owner: "Well, I'm busy drinking fine cognac and sailing my brand new 120ft yacht across the Pacific with a crew of 46 beautiful Thai girls right now. It'll have to wait until I get back sometime next year..."
Right now they are on a high, but with the introduction of the Intel chip they are sliding down (eg computers cost more, quality problems highlighted in ZDNet, and delays in the latest iPods).
Apple machines are closer now to parity with wintel in dollars/performance terms than they ever have been before, and ZDnet is the New York Post of tech news sites (all negativity and sensationalism, all the time!). There are issues with Macbook Pro hardware, but I don't think it's fair to characterize the whole company as being on a downward slide.
Insert obligatory 'I'm moving to digg because slashdot blows and is poorly maintained' comment.
I'll see that "I'm moving to digg because slashdot blows and is poorly maintained" and raise you an "I came back to slashdot because digg has more dupes, more inaccurate headlines, and even dumber comments". Taco may need a grammar coach, but at least you don't see many "ZOMG free energy from water!!!1" articles on the front page here...
It's political and financial willpower to do the right thing.
If there was a way to make as much money on a one-shot cancer cure as on pills to control stomach acid, we would have it now. Antibiotics are easy to develop, the test procedures have been refined by years of experience, they've been mass-produced for a hundred years now, yet no new antibiotics have gone on the market in the last 20 years. Does anyone really think science has run out of substances that kill bacteria? No, the problem is that there's no money on cures or prevention, people take them once and then recover (or don't get sick in the first place). There's far more money to be made in selling Americans with health insurance $3 purple pills to treat heartburn or baldness or enlarged prostates or to let old farts have sex until they're ninety than in saving hundreds of millions in Africa from certain death by AIDS.
If the drug companies that stand to benefit from current medical research want donated CPU cycles, then they should start acting like they really intend to develop and market (at affordable prices) a cancer cure or a vaccine for AIDS or some other miracle cure rather than yet another heavily advertised long-term treatment to help baby boomers keep pretending they aren't getting old. If they want to keep on milking the old folks' prescription drug benefits for all they're worth, they can use some of those profits to pay for supercomputer time.
If communication is valuable, then why not dress-up?
Reading your comment made me realize that a big portion of what people call "maturity" is the ability to refrain from communicating, and keep the communication we can't get by without confined to narrow acceptable set of topics and manners.
Pre-school kids talk all the time. Some kids change their shirts 4 or 5 times a day, to suit their mood of the hour.
They've got questions about everything. They're not afraid to tell the old guy in the next row at church that his clothes look wierd and he smells funny. They know when they're being lied or talked down to, and they'll call you on it every time. Teenagers may not respond to their parents, but they still communicate extensively with their friends. They'll dress goth or punk or preppie to show who they are and how they feel. They hash over every personal, social and academic problem with their peers.
Then you have adults, mature people who say little and communicate less: a non-commital politically-correct greeting here, a meaningless "have a nice day" there, a few low-content emails and a meeting full of corporate newspeak in between. They don't tell the boss his ideas are unworkable and he has spaghetti sauce on his tie. They know all the candidates are lying, but they vote anyway and never call them on it. Instead of burdening friends with personal problems, they keep it to themselves lest they appear immature (or pay big bucks for a therapist to hold the same conversation high-school friends used to have every day for free). They dress the same way every day because it's expected of them, and because expressing your opinions about music, sports, politics, etc on a T-shirt is for teenagers.
Maybe "maturity" is just the word for doing exactly what everyone around you expects, and doing it very quietly...
You must have missed the memo. Crack was the hand-wringer's drug of choice in the 1990s. Everyone's moved on to worrying about methamphetamine now. Also, if you're going to talk about kiddie porn, you have to work the phrases "sexual predator" and "registered sex offender" in there somehow. Get a subscrition to USA Today or turn on CNN or something...
(twenty years of personal computing might seem like a long time, but it isn't)
It's more like 30 years for the GUI (Xerox PARC started developing their GUI for the Alto in 1972) and that *is* a long time.
In the first 30 years of powered flight we went from the primitive Wright flyer (range about 1/2 mile, controlled by pulling wires) to the DC-3 (range about 1,000 miles, modern controls, some are still in use today). The first 30 years of automobiles went from carrieges with a steam engine in the back and a wooden horse head on the front to the model T Ford. The first 30 years of radio went from morse code tapped out on spark-gap transmitters to commercial music and voice broadcasts.
The first 30 years of GUI development have seen the amazing technological leap from using a mouse to click on blocky black-and-white icons and widgets to using a mouse to click on blocky 16-color icons and widgets, to using a mouse to click on smooth 32-bit color icons and widgets. We're still using the same concepts of a desktop, folders and files, the same types of widgets, and the same input devices. The graphics have gotten prettier, but that's about it.
The Canadian National Post is a neoconservative-owned and edited paper that has been caught making up facts recently. They were the first to break the story alleging the Iranian government was going to force non-Muslims to wear identifying badges in public (and published the story next to a photo of two Jews in nazi-era Germany wearing their infamous badges). The story turned out to be a fabrication.
Oil is a mature industry. The major fields have been discovered, great innovations have been made, most of the players have consolidated into a few huge corporations, and now with all that investment paid for and massive economies of scale at work, it's pure profit. Exxon and the rest are selling a product that costs less than $1 to produce, refine, and market for $3.25. They don't want to give that up. Throwing the economic weight of a big energy company behind developing new less-polluting technologies will cost them huge amounts of money, with no certainty of ever seeing a profit. Selling more gasoline makes massive profits right now.
Also, remember what happened to cigarette companies when they finally were forced to admit that smoking kills? Imagine how big a product liability suit for fossil fuel related climate change might be...
Starcraft *was* one of those "B-games" the article talked about! Less depth than the Civilization or Command & Conquer series, less fun than Warcraft 2, what was so great about it? It only sold umpteen million copies because of battle.net (and because nobody bothered to tell the Koreans it sucked).
I'll probably get modded down to "-5, Starcraft Hater" for this, but I can't possibly be the only one who thought SC was just Warcraft redone in black, purple and blue...
Yes, that's true, but Microsoft must have licensed hundreds of patents for Windows and Media Player. If they wanted license one more to add full mp3 support, they could have done it. Instead they decided to use the artificial limits on free mp3 encoding to sell wma.
Since our EULA didn't allow benchmarks to be published
Did you ever consider adding an "if you publish mean things about our products, you have to buy the CEO's daughter a pony" clause to go along with that? Seems equally reasonable to me...
[Standard disclaimer: I never was VMWare customer, and now that I hear they think it appropriate to restrict what I may write about as part of their software license, I never will be. Maybe they should add a section forbidding users to reveal the terms of their EULA on slashdot]
Remember folks, Microsoft is developing their own page presentation format (formerly "Metro", now xps) that's going to compete directly with pdf. Remember what happened when Microsoft decided they wanted their own audio codec? They made wma the default format in Windows Media Player, but also included annoyingly limited "support" for mp3. Whenever a user ripped a CD to mp3 format, WMP would pop up a nag screen suggesting that they use wma instead, and if the user ignored the suggestion, he got a nasty-sounding 64kbps file.
I suspect they planned to include crippled pdf support in Office 2007 with bloated output, arbitrary resolution limits, and nag screens suggesting that using xps would make the document look better. Adobe (unlike Fraunhofer) saw what MS was doing, and told them to bug off.
Not to offend someone who might be an accomplished long-time net journalist or anything, but who the fuck is slyck.com? Does any other news site (or even a well-known blog) have this story? TPB has faked being shut down before, and some fourth-rate news sites bought the story last time, too. I wonder if anyone has checked with the Swedish authorities to see if they're claiming credit...
Because the cause of those users not being able to use their own computers isn't that those computers are broken. It's that they are are too busy relaying spam and particiating in DDoS or SSH brute force attacks to do anything else.
You're missing the point of an insugency. They don't need to make progress, they just need to stay alive until we run out of money and motivation and leave.
After the shim is compiled, it is linked with the binary-only portion, to produce the final NVIDIA kernel module.
And there lies the problem. The shim is a derived work of the kernel (or that's the anonymous complainer's position anyway), the binary-only portion contains un-GPL-able code, and the final driver contains both. They can compile and use the finished driver on their own machines, but can't distribute it without violating the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
If those 8 companies were splitting the sales of ram, it only takes one company to come in and sell it at a proper price and take 100% of the business ...and it only takes one member of the cartel refusing to license their DRAM patents to the upstart to make that business 100% illegal. The free market is almost always powerless to correct abuses of a monopoly or a cartel.
Well if it ain't mister Johnny-come-lately himself! In MY day, we wrote "code" in pencil, did computation on an abacus, and sent our cliche posts to slashdot by telegram. ...mumble mumble... MD5 sums by hand ...mumble... seige of Vicksburg ...mumble... TCP/IP over smoke signals... durn whipper-snappers
I wonder if he realizes that with the right connections and a few thousand bucks, *everything* about his life is shared on the internet. Financial transactions, phone bills, property ownership, FedEx and UPS shipping records, legal records, etc are all there in corporate databases and on information brokering sites. A judicious use of the phrase "patriot act" could probably get you all the bank statements and phone records you could ever want.
He can be smug now, but his next job interview could still go something like this...
"So, Mr. Rogers, I see here that in September of 1988 you wrote a $200 cheque to a women's health clinic that no member of your family had ever visited before. That's about the same time your teenage daughter broke off her relationship with the Tanner boy who used to live down the street from you, or at least she stopped calling him every night, isn't it? The CEO is strongly pro-life and things like this concern him greatly. Anything you want to tell us about that incident?"
You probably have CTrax because the RIAA has threatened to sue colleges over student file sharing. $150,000 statutory damages per willful infringment (read: copy), times 10,000 students, times 1000 copied songs per student = a $1.5 trillion lawsuit. Much cheaper to license CTracks for a couple million per year and call it RIAA insurance that to risk losing a suit that would bankrupt the school (and the whole state government if it's public).
Would you bother fixing bugs if someone just gave you $586 million for a bug-riddled pile of crap? I sure wouldn't. I suspect the QA process at myspace goes something like this...
Minimum Wage Support Monkey: "Umm, sir, we're getting lots of bug reports from users. They say chat doesn't work, and some of their pages have been down since Thursday."
Myspace Co-Owner: "Well, I'm busy drinking fine cognac and sailing my brand new 120ft yacht across the Pacific with a crew of 46 beautiful Thai girls right now. It'll have to wait until I get back sometime next year..."
But if they start recording new episodes of Geeks in Space now, people would call it a "podcast" and we can't have that!
Yup. We have icons for TurboLinux, VA, Ximian, Be, Digital, and a few other dead-but-not forgotten companies too. See http://slashdot.org/topics.shtml
Right now they are on a high, but with the introduction of the Intel chip they are sliding down (eg computers cost more, quality problems highlighted in ZDNet, and delays in the latest iPods).
Apple machines are closer now to parity with wintel in dollars/performance terms than they ever have been before, and ZDnet is the New York Post of tech news sites (all negativity and sensationalism, all the time!). There are issues with Macbook Pro hardware, but I don't think it's fair to characterize the whole company as being on a downward slide.
Insert obligatory 'I'm moving to digg because slashdot blows and is poorly maintained' comment.
I'll see that "I'm moving to digg because slashdot blows and is poorly maintained" and raise you an "I came back to slashdot because digg has more dupes, more inaccurate headlines, and even dumber comments". Taco may need a grammar coach, but at least you don't see many "ZOMG free energy from water!!!1" articles on the front page here...
It's political and financial willpower to do the right thing.
If there was a way to make as much money on a one-shot cancer cure as on pills to control stomach acid, we would have it now. Antibiotics are easy to develop, the test procedures have been refined by years of experience, they've been mass-produced for a hundred years now, yet no new antibiotics have gone on the market in the last 20 years. Does anyone really think science has run out of substances that kill bacteria? No, the problem is that there's no money on cures or prevention, people take them once and then recover (or don't get sick in the first place). There's far more money to be made in selling Americans with health insurance $3 purple pills to treat heartburn or baldness or enlarged prostates or to let old farts have sex until they're ninety than in saving hundreds of millions in Africa from certain death by AIDS.
If the drug companies that stand to benefit from current medical research want donated CPU cycles, then they should start acting like they really intend to develop and market (at affordable prices) a cancer cure or a vaccine for AIDS or some other miracle cure rather than yet another heavily advertised long-term treatment to help baby boomers keep pretending they aren't getting old. If they want to keep on milking the old folks' prescription drug benefits for all they're worth, they can use some of those profits to pay for supercomputer time.
If Microsoft have their $35 billion invested in something that returns 3% annually they can keep paying the $2.5 million daily fine forever...
If communication is valuable, then why not dress-up?
Reading your comment made me realize that a big portion of what people call "maturity" is the ability to refrain from communicating, and keep the communication we can't get by without confined to narrow acceptable set of topics and manners.
Pre-school kids talk all the time. Some kids change their shirts 4 or 5 times a day, to suit their mood of the hour.
They've got questions about everything. They're not afraid to tell the old guy in the next row at church that his clothes look wierd and he smells funny. They know when they're being lied or talked down to, and they'll call you on it every time.
Teenagers may not respond to their parents, but they still communicate extensively with their friends. They'll dress goth or punk or preppie to show who they are and how they feel. They hash over every personal, social and academic problem with their peers.
Then you have adults, mature people who say little and communicate less: a non-commital politically-correct greeting here, a meaningless "have a nice day" there, a few low-content emails and a meeting full of corporate newspeak in between. They don't tell the boss his ideas are unworkable and he has spaghetti sauce on his tie. They know all the candidates are lying, but they vote anyway and never call them on it. Instead of burdening friends with personal problems, they keep it to themselves lest they appear immature (or pay big bucks for a therapist to hold the same conversation high-school friends used to have every day for free). They dress the same way every day because it's expected of them, and because expressing your opinions about music, sports, politics, etc on a T-shirt is for teenagers.
Maybe "maturity" is just the word for doing exactly what everyone around you expects, and doing it very quietly...
...to buy crack...
You must have missed the memo. Crack was the hand-wringer's drug of choice in the 1990s. Everyone's moved on to worrying about methamphetamine now. Also, if you're going to talk about kiddie porn, you have to work the phrases "sexual predator" and "registered sex offender" in there somehow. Get a subscrition to USA Today or turn on CNN or something...
(twenty years of personal computing might seem like a long time, but it isn't)
It's more like 30 years for the GUI (Xerox PARC started developing their GUI for the Alto in 1972) and that *is* a long time.
In the first 30 years of powered flight we went from the primitive Wright flyer (range about 1/2 mile, controlled by pulling wires) to the DC-3 (range about 1,000 miles, modern controls, some are still in use today). The first 30 years of automobiles went from carrieges with a steam engine in the back and a wooden horse head on the front to the model T Ford. The first 30 years of radio went from morse code tapped out on spark-gap transmitters to commercial music and voice broadcasts.
The first 30 years of GUI development have seen the amazing technological leap from using a mouse to click on blocky black-and-white icons and widgets to using a mouse to click on blocky 16-color icons and widgets, to using a mouse to click on smooth 32-bit color icons and widgets. We're still using the same concepts of a desktop, folders and files, the same types of widgets, and the same input devices. The graphics have gotten prettier, but that's about it.
The Canadian National Post is a neoconservative-owned and edited paper that has been caught making up facts recently. They were the first to break the story alleging the Iranian government was going to force non-Muslims to wear identifying badges in public (and published the story next to a photo of two Jews in nazi-era Germany wearing their infamous badges). The story turned out to be a fabrication.
Oil is a mature industry. The major fields have been discovered, great innovations have been made, most of the players have consolidated into a few huge corporations, and now with all that investment paid for and massive economies of scale at work, it's pure profit. Exxon and the rest are selling a product that costs less than $1 to produce, refine, and market for $3.25. They don't want to give that up. Throwing the economic weight of a big energy company behind developing new less-polluting technologies will cost them huge amounts of money, with no certainty of ever seeing a profit. Selling more gasoline makes massive profits right now.
Also, remember what happened to cigarette companies when they finally were forced to admit that smoking kills? Imagine how big a product liability suit for fossil fuel related climate change might be...
Starcraft *was* one of those "B-games" the article talked about! Less depth than the Civilization or Command & Conquer series, less fun than Warcraft 2, what was so great about it? It only sold umpteen million copies because of battle.net (and because nobody bothered to tell the Koreans it sucked).
I'll probably get modded down to "-5, Starcraft Hater" for this, but I can't possibly be the only one who thought SC was just Warcraft redone in black, purple and blue...
Yes, that's true, but Microsoft must have licensed hundreds of patents for Windows and Media Player. If they wanted license one more to add full mp3 support, they could have done it. Instead they decided to use the artificial limits on free mp3 encoding to sell wma.
Since our EULA didn't allow benchmarks to be published
Did you ever consider adding an "if you publish mean things about our products, you have to buy the CEO's daughter a pony" clause to go along with that? Seems equally reasonable to me...
[Standard disclaimer: I never was VMWare customer, and now that I hear they think it appropriate to restrict what I may write about as part of their software license, I never will be. Maybe they should add a section forbidding users to reveal the terms of their EULA on slashdot]
Remember folks, Microsoft is developing their own page presentation format (formerly "Metro", now xps) that's going to compete directly with pdf. Remember what happened when Microsoft decided they wanted their own audio codec? They made wma the default format in Windows Media Player, but also included annoyingly limited "support" for mp3. Whenever a user ripped a CD to mp3 format, WMP would pop up a nag screen suggesting that they use wma instead, and if the user ignored the suggestion, he got a nasty-sounding 64kbps file.
I suspect they planned to include crippled pdf support in Office 2007 with bloated output, arbitrary resolution limits, and nag screens suggesting that using xps would make the document look better. Adobe (unlike Fraunhofer) saw what MS was doing, and told them to bug off.
Not to offend someone who might be an accomplished long-time net journalist or anything, but who the fuck is slyck.com? Does any other news site (or even a well-known blog) have this story? TPB has faked being shut down before, and some fourth-rate news sites bought the story last time, too. I wonder if anyone has checked with the Swedish authorities to see if they're claiming credit...
Because the cause of those users not being able to use their own computers isn't that those computers are broken. It's that they are are too busy relaying spam and particiating in DDoS or SSH brute force attacks to do anything else.
You're missing the point of an insugency. They don't need to make progress, they just need to stay alive until we run out of money and motivation and leave.
Two comments on this story and flexbeta is already down. Coral cache and mirrordot didn't even have time to grab a copy. Great job, everyone.
After the shim is compiled, it is linked with the binary-only portion, to produce the final NVIDIA kernel module.
And there lies the problem. The shim is a derived work of the kernel (or that's the anonymous complainer's position anyway), the binary-only portion contains un-GPL-able code, and the final driver contains both. They can compile and use the finished driver on their own machines, but can't distribute it without violating the GPL.